The War on Terror and the Transformation of Political Islam

The war on terror intensified widespread misconceptions about the nature and complexity of Islamism. The paper analyses the trajectory towards the acceptance of democracy and human rights on the part of mainstream Islamist groups and argues that such development ran the risk of being derailed by an ill‐conceived war on terror that in the short term benefited those sectors of Islamism that always had violence at the centre of their political project.